THE NEXTNESS OF THINGS
The journey from being a son to becoming a father spans all of life’s chapters and offers dramatically shifting fashion scenery. This is one traveller’s view.
For my 12th birthday I asked my dad to take me to see the latest big movie: Top Gun. But before Goose, Maverick and Iceman could take our breaths away, we faced a problem. Top Gun carried a 15 rating – and there was no way I looked 15. So we settled on disguise. It was 1986 and his shambolic wardrobe contained sprawling evidence of a life almost as exciting as and arguably more tumultuous than the movie we were plotting to see. Flak jackets and fur hats were souvenirs from distant wars and adventures behind the Iron Curtain. Hilditch & Key shirts, E. Marinella ties, desert boots and tailoring – a lot of Austin Reed, I think, but some Italian stuff too – hailed from his stints on Fleet Street, postings to Paris and assignments in Florence and Rome. I loved his leather-strapped linen-canvas Holland & Holland holdall, much more than the sudden departures it represented.
We chose a country-gent tweed flat cap to pull low over my freckled face and a short trench coat (Aquascutum?) to suggest the illusion of height. It sounds extraordinary today, but in 1986 smoking was allowed in cinemas: my dad with great delight lent me a pipe. It was possibly a Dunhill White Spot, but definitely not one from which he smoked the Lebanese red hashish whose aroma – although it’s been quite a while – is my dad-remembering Proustian madeleine.
Outside the Pizza Express next to the cinema I feared imminent capture with gnawing certainty. But with that pipe clenched between my teeth and cap pulled low, we sidled into the Bayswater Odeon entirely unchallenged. Dad’s shoulders shuddered up and down when he laughed, and this whole illicit operation had them bouncing at the double. The film was a blast (bad luck for Goose), and even though the cinema ushers likely didn’t care about kids sneaking in, I remember – still in that happy window in which you yearn to be older than you are, not younger – feeling proud that these clothes had allowed me to be mistaken not for what I was, but for what I wished to be.
Years before I ever saw a runway fashion show – or even knew what fashion is – I began in part to relate myself to the world around me with the language of clothes, shoes, watches (sometimes) and other worn items. At first exclusively, and even today partially, this interaction was through a lens shaped by the example of my father and my stepfather. Where they had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. And just like them, there was a point at which being educated by their example switched to a different stage of development: the shaping of my own taste in the context of a rejection of theirs.
Consider that you consume your earliest music according to your parents’ generational taste before inevitably encountering as a teenager music that appeals to you in part because it challenges their taste – ideally, it will drive them crazy – and thus represents your own maturation towards independence. The development of taste in clothes and fashion is similar in that it is often shaped by those twin poles of imitation and rejection. However, because of the fixed nature of their prime functions – to be worn and to adorn a physical body whose fundamental shape remains constant across the generations – fashion’s material substance will never transform as radically as music’s immaterial sound. Not unlike the bicycle, whose shape is also defined by the physiology of the animal riding it.
My years watching runway shows have slowly led me to appreciate that there is only one element of fashion that is ever “new”. And that element is not clothing, but people. Yes, innovation in raw materials does allow for functional innovation, but the end product is serving the same purpose – to be worn and adorn. Every individual person who comes to fashion in each phase of each generation is a singular glint in a myriad kaleidoscope whose actions and tastes define their time. What each fresh generation of people wants from fashion (and what fashion offers it) is the perception that fashion is “new”, that its codes are specific to their time of existence and identity.
This desire can be met when an individual designer or company stages a fresh aesthetic intervention that gains traction, becomes popular, and falls successfully into fashion. But these trends only appear new in your earliest phase of paying attention – when you yourself are new. They are the churning, ever-changing surface of taste’s ocean. They churn thanks to deep, historical currents of passed-down examples and experience from previous generations, and the buffeting winds of interaction between members of the contemporary. The longer you watch the surface, the more clearly you see the patterns and repetitions emerge. And you know that you yourself are old.
Now I have two sons and two stepsons of my own. Giving them clothes, sometimes new, sometimes passed down, is a deeply satisfying part of fatherhood. Discussing their likes and dislikes, and introducing them to things for the first time is a way to understand both what connects us and what sets us apart from each other. My 11-year-old’s nerdy passion for adventure, country and military wear is a reflection of his dreams of a future spent exploring the world: we are outfitting him for the life he plans on living. My 14-year-old’s tastes are less function-driven, and more generic: now he is big enough to wear my stuff, it is so pleasurable to give him things I love and watch him learn to love them too. The latest is a Brunello Cucinelli shearling coat, not as oversized on him as that trench I wore to Top Gun, but which when he wears you see contains the space required in which to fully grow.
With a stepson you must respect the primacy of their biological father (not to mention their mother), however clothes are a powerful tool through which to build your secondary relationship: you give them presence and presents. When my stepdad brought back a pair of just-released Jordan 4’s from New York on my 15th birthday I was in dreamland: now I remember that feeling and pass it on.
After my dad died I found a page in one of his reporter’s notebooks dated June 1978. I would have been three. That day I can’t remember in Manly, Sydney, he described me heading to kindergarten, “with his orange bag, looking hunky and solid. A picture of his future manhood, I hope. All energy and confidence and rushing towards the nextness of things. He sleeps on the floor, saying he’s a dog. If only the bloody world would stand still at times like this and we could replay it forever. I suppose this is actually our eternal life.” I don’t have that orange bag any more, but I do have his Holland & Holland.